Here’s a quote by James McClendon Jr., Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Fuller Theological Seminary about the importance of jazz.

"Yet beneath and behind this so-called popular American music, generated as inevitably as a great city’s powerhouse generates unwanted urban smog, vibrates another music, dinstinctly American, that is all that the blur of popular sound is not.  This unique, aesthetically powerful, original jazz.  It is jazz with its partner the blues that constitutes a distinctly American music, thereby offering American culture (and increasingly, world culture) a fresh art.

Thus it is that any theology of American culture must attend the jazz scene.  A theology of jazz is not a scholar’s whimsy; it is a required work."

I couldn’t agree more!